iCloud was Jobs’ best shot at killing Dropbox… and it missed badly

It looks like Steve Ballmer wasn’t the only famous tech CEO who underestimated Dropbox’s staying power. ITBusiness.ca reports that Dropbox CEO Drew Houston this week recounted how late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs tried to buy out his company a few years ago and then vowed to kill off Dropbox when Houston refused to sell it to him. Jobs then took his best shot at Dropbox when he unveiled iCloud back in 2011 as Apple’s own cloud storage service that was deeply integrated with its popular iTunes software.

“He was calling out by name and saying he wants to kill us with iCloud,” Houston said.

Even though iCloud has been a successful cloud storage service in its own right, it hasn’t come anywhere close to Jobs’ goal of killing off Dropbox. In fact, Dropbox announced earlier this month that it now supports 200 million user accounts, a remarkable number for a company that has no associated content ecosystem as Apple, Microsoft and Google all have. Houston said this week that he expects his company will continue to thrive on its own and noted that it’s beaten back heavy competition from major tech rivals in the past.